Going into the fourth week of camp, I feel I can adequately express what it's like. Every week's schedule and menu are exactly the same and so all of us staffers have settled into the sometimes deadening monotony of Groundhog Week. For diplomacy's sake, let's pretend I've never mentioned the actual name of my place of employment...so I can now safely discuss the alum of a place called...Treeland University. They are scary wealthy; they are deeply entitled; a lot of them represent a caste I'd never encountered before, "west coast preppy"; they are incredibly wasteful (in my shift alone we go through hundreds of paper cups, napkins, lids, and cocoa packets each night--imagine how I love that); and as a whole they are overwhelmingly generous and kind, although it sometimes feels like they are leaning down to pat your head from the top of their pedestal.
Meanwhile the undergrads who represent the bulk of the staff (or "staph", their preferred nomenclature), are enthusiastic, starry-eyed, exhaustively creative, and often very inexperienced when it comes to actual work. We "permies" (permanent staff) have to forgive them that because while they play hard, they work hard too.
The biggest difference between camp and conference is the sheer number of people constantly milling around. Instead of the maximum 150 or so guests we accommodate during conference, during summer we play host to about 270 people on our little plot of paradise. Children are loud, adults are loud, staph are loud. Fortunately my little cabin is one of the most isolated ones, tucked back in the trees next to the volleyball court. It stays quiet and super cool, even in the "heat waves" Tahoe keeps experiencing (90 degrees is laughable when the humidity hovers at a comfortable 15%). And then on my weekends I scurry back to blessed real life in town, to ride bikes and hang out with friends who don't want to talk about camp.
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